The first week of the Tour has been mad but it is always like that. You tend to forget how it is because it is really like this only at the Tour. You always hope it is going to be better, think it is mad because it is a certain year or because you are somewhere particular like Brittany and the roads are narrower, but every year it is just the same. It is something we are used to but it is still remarkable. It has been like that for a few days but hopefully it will start to settle down now. We have had a couple of straightforward, traditional bunch sprints, days when Cadel Evans and I do not have to be in there at the very end.

At times, unless you are in the very front line of the peloton, it is a lottery whether you crash or not. Obviously I crashed out last year in the first week but that is not on my mind particularly. It is this year that counts. It is hard to explain what it is like but this is how it is: it only takes the guy next to you to take one little risk, to come up the inside, or have the road narrow slightly. There are percentages involved, you can place yourself in the bunch but you can be last or first in line and stay upright; anywhere in between, maybe not.

On Tuesday coming into Boulogne we were descending on a country road, the crash went at 20th wheel from the front, and that was it. I had to get off my bike, put it on my shoulder like a cyclo-cross rider and run down the verge into a field to get round it, as there was no way through all the guys on the deck. The stressful thing is that if there is a crash and it splits, sometimes the race does not come back together. On Tuesday I just got back in, and that was it. The guys behind did not.

There are certain things which make the Tour's early stages different from any other race. It is mainly that the riders all want to be at the front. There will be four or five of us from Sky there, with four or five from Radioshack riding to keep the yellow jersey, and then Jurgen van den Broeck will steam up with his four or five, BMC will be there for Cadel Evans. Suddenly there will be 30 guys fighting at the front and then the guys behind get nervous there are riders who want to win the sprint, go for the stage as well, obviously – so before you know it there are 70 riders going nuts and that is when crashes happen.

Another thing is that these are not always normal stages. Stage one had a hard uphill finish so all the guys going for the general classification were up there, all the climbers as well as the riders going for the stage. Stage two, when Cav won, was calmer because there are only certain sprinters have a chance on that kind of finish, so at least in the final five kilometres the overall guys tend to slip back a bit.

And then there are the crowds. I think the spectators do not realise how close to us they are and how fast we are travelling. Everyone is holding a phone or a digital camera or an iPad, so their hands are protruding towards the peloton and that is another few inches take-up. In terms of getting in the right position the problem is you cannot sit in front at 60 kilometres per hour all day. Christian Knees was sheltering me early on but he can do it for only so long and there is always the question of what he will have left in the final week. These are nervous days for all of us. On Sunday Chris Froome and I went through the same hole in the road, he punctured and lost over a minute but I avoided a flat. On Tuesday we lost Kosta (Kanstantsin Siutsou) in the first big crash, then Richie Porte crashed and Michael Rogers punctured, and for a little while it felt like touch and go as I was the only rider from the team in the front group. I was thinking "I'd better not puncture here", it was about 20km and I would never have got back in. That could have been two minutes lost all of a sudden.

I do not know where losing Kosta leaves us. We will appreciate what losing him means only later in the race. If we do what we plan to do he could be a huge loss. He is one of the key climbing domestiques in the team. He is not a rider who is going to be there at the finish of a mountain stage but he was going to be riding most of the day in the high mountains, then drop off towards the end. So we are a rider down and we will miss him greatly.

I saw him in the hotel after the stage on Tuesday and the big picture was the last thing on my mind. You don't think "shit, we've lost someone", you can only express sympathy for a guy who has broken his leg and will be healing for three months. There is nothing you can say to a guy in that situation. I told him not to worry about us. You have to keep in your mind it is only a bike race.